Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Monday July 07, 2014 @05:59PM
from the new-and-shiny dept.

KDE Community (3396057) writes The KDE Community is proud to announce the release of KDE Frameworks 5.0. Frameworks 5 is the next generation of KDE libraries, modularized and optimized for easy integration in Qt applications. The Frameworks offer a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. There are over 50 different Frameworks as part of this release providing solutions including hardware integration, file format support, additional widgets, plotting functions, spell checking and more. Many of the Frameworks are cross platform and have minimal or no extra dependencies making them easy to build and add to any Qt application.
Version five of the desktop shell, Plasma, will be released soon, and packages of Plasma-next and KDE Frameworks 5 will trickle into Ubuntu Utopic over the next few days. There's a Live CD of Frameworks 5 / Plasma-next, last updated July 4th.

Are you sure that you're looking at the right Wikipedia page? I was curious about the GP's claims, too, so I checked out the reference. I don't see the content warning that you're talking about, but I do see a table with those stats, and a pie graph of the data, too. There are multiple references for those stats too and they all look legit to me. All but one of my friends uses KDE 4, so I think those numbers are reasonable. The guy who doesn't uses Lxde. None of my friends and nobody at my Linux meetup group (about 60 people) uses Gnome 3. I think it really is a dead desktop since it's just so awful.

If the share is 0.2% does it matter? There are more reading this than using that.

What's the market share of a Bugatti Veryon" Or a Lamborghini? You "market share" drones need to move to Idaho, so you can get a license plate that brags about "Famous Potatoes" to put on your Toyota Corolla.

A better "run command" dialog, a much improved window manager with amazing compositing, better screen management, bluetooth support, network management that didn't suck, hotplug device support, a more configurable taskbar that also includes launchers ('pinned' apps), pervasive search, shells for small-screen devices.. I could go on and on.. and that's only Plasma. The libraries also delivered huge improvements all over the place.

Sorry, I had most of this stuff in KDE 3.5? Yes, it was under different apps, some of them not part of KDE, but worked fine for me. And if all of this is so much better, why does it work so much worse?

Of course, for people who have made up their minds to rag on the 4.x series will make ridiculous claims like "rotating widgets were the only new thing". Get with reality, even if it.. no, ESPECIALLY if.. it runs counter to your pet ideas.

Ah yes, the user is wrong. Well, do as you see fit anyway, this discussion would have been useful a couple of years ago. Your side with the 'user is always wrong, lets change it anyway' has won, and now KDE (and also Gnome, with the exact same reasoning) has become irrelevant for all but a handful of users (actually, I am one of these users that still uses KDE 4 daily, mostly because kioslaves is great). Hope you enjoy your victory!

However, one thing I want to make clear, I have been using KDE4 for years exclusively (right up to this day), I have liked it a lot despite all the shortcomings. I went to the conferences, I contributed to KDE Look (remember that? That actually had good content back when there were still users), etc. And only now that I've been back to KDE 3.5 for a bit, I realized just how shitty KDE has become compared to what it was.